Data Resources
The Association of Religion Data Archives (The ARDA)
The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) strives to democratize access to the best data on religion. Founded as the American Religion Data Archive in 1997 and going online in 1998, the initial archive was targeted at researchers interested in American religion. The targeted audience and the data collection have both greatly expanded since 1998, now including American and international collections and developing features for educators, journalists, religious congregations, and researchers. Data included in the ARDA are submitted by the foremost religion scholars and research centers in the world.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
An international consortium of about 700 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD)
NSD is one of the largest archives for research data of its kind and provides data to researchers and students in Norway and abroad. Additionally, NSD is a resource centre, which assists researchers with regard to data gathering, data analysis, and issues of methodology, privacy and research ethics.
North American Jewish Data Bank
The North American Jewish Data Bank at the University of Connecticut is the central repository of social scientific studies of North American Jewry. The Data Bank’s primary functions are to: acquire, archive, and disseminate quantitative data sets and reports, both contemporary and historical; and encourage utilization of the archive through training and provide information about methods for studying Jewish communities.
The Odum Institute maintains one of the oldest and largest archives of machine-readable data in the U.S. Its Louis Harris Data Center is the exclusive national repository for Louis Harris public opinion data. The Institute has an extensive collection of U.S. Census data, including one of the most complete holdings for 1970 Census files. Another major source of data is the North Carolina State Data Center.
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is one of the world’s leading archives of social science data, specializing in data from surveys of public opinion. The data held by the Roper Center range from the 1930s, when survey research was in its infancy, to the present. Most of the data are from the United States, but over 50 nations are represented.
The World Christian Database provides statistical information on world religions, Christian denominations, and people groups. Extensive data are available on 9,000 Christian denominations, 13,000 ethnolinguistic peoples, as well as data on 5,000 cities, 3,000 provinces and 239 countries.